"Jobs" vs. "Steve Jobs": Hollywood Takes Another Stab At Telling the Steve Jobs Story

theodp writes: Didn't like Jobs, the 2013 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher? Maybe you'll prefer Steve Jobs, the 2015 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender. "Steve Jobs is a tech visionary, total dick," writes Esquire's Matt Patches in his mini-review of the just-released Steve Jobs trailer. So, is inspiring kids to become the "Next Steve Jobs" a good or bad thing?

Comments

Re:Why does Jobs always steal the limelight?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember Woz very tastefully saying that when Dennis Ritchie died a few days after Job's that none of what they both were doing at Apple would be possible without DMR.

Re:Why does Jobs always steal the limelight?

[mccalli]

Thing is - there were a lot of talented hardware engineers at the time. Woz owed an awfully large amount to Chuck Peddle, for instance, and the role of MOS and Commodore is massively underplayed these days in a "history is written by the victors"-style approach. Most of the early pure engineering-led eight bit companies died a death, but Apple survived. Why is that? It wasn't due to Woz.

I really don't want to underplay Woz and I agree with the comments, but you can see from his ventures since that the involvement of Woz does not necessarily make for a sustainable company, and Woz alone could not have created Apple.

Jobs is admired because greed

[tekrat]

Let's face it; the reason Jobs is so admired is because we live in a "gimme gimme" world. The 1% love him because he actually did "build it" out of nothing (on the backs of thousands of other employees) -- which was their mantra while Mitt Romney was trying to prove that the 1% were the "job creators". The reality of course is that most of the very wealthy inherited their money; but that's the subject of another discussion.

What Jobs did was bully the people below him into creating great work. He knew they could do better if they just put in that 100-hour week and ended up divorced and alcoholics. Only by destroying those below you can achieve greatness by taking credit for all their hard work.

The 1% love Jobs because that's what they want to do; abuse everyone below them and in so doing, whip them into making something they'll be admired for.

But they are forgetting that Steve actually did have some out-of-the-box thinking; he wasn't a total idiot, and he could sell ice-boxes to eskimos. He actually had some skill and talent and a fuckload of charisma, and that's also why people were willing to kill themselves for him.

But the average borg-drone MBA only sees Steve being a dick, and assumes that's how he's supposed to treat his employees, and that's why America is so fucked up.

Apple made nice things, but America can't have nice things. Unless of course, you're already fabulously wealthy.

And you all thought that Bill Gates was bad...

[alexjplant]

The Jobs hagiography and cult-like behavior surrounding Apple products from my generation ("millennials") is disturbing. If I had a nickel for the number of times that I asked somebody to click the Start button only to be met with the response "Where's that? Oh, sorry... I use a Mac at home" I'd be a billionaire. Which is more believable: that you don't know the location of a UI element that's been an institution SINCE THE DAY YOU POPPED OUT OF YOUR MOTHER THAT EXISTS ON A PLATFORM WITH GREATER THAN 90% MARKET PENETRATION or that you're not-so-subtly objecting to the hyperbolic pain and anguish that is the necessity of using Windows NT in a corporate environment? Apple's shit is just as uniquely stinky as every other tech vendor's. Their error messages are even more garbage and cryptic than Windows (ever try connecting to a CIFS-shared printer on OS X?). OS X apps crash with the same degree of regularity as Windows. And on top of all of this their UI is downright abhorrent and unapologetically dedicated to what some focus group leader perceives to be the LCD of computer users. OS X is the only desktop environment I've struggled to grok after having used at least a dozen different ones with some degree of regularity in my lifetime. Nothing about Apple at this point distinguishes it from the myriad of other offerings in the consumer IT world except for their Flavor-Aid, "Genius Bars," and pricing model. Jobs created a monster that's far greater of a threat to our freedom than M$. I can't help but think that we'd have been better off had NeXT succeeded and he hadn't had the smug satisfaction of returning to Apple and riding it up from its lowest point in history.

Re:We're All Dicks

[nmb3000]

We're all dicks.

I dislike how this phrase is being used because I think it trivializes the extent to which Jobs was not a good person and introduces an inappropriate levity into the discussion. A much better term would have been acute sociopath.

And another movie about Jobs? Sounds more myopic than biopic. When Hollywood starts making remakes of their failed biographies you know they've scraped through the bottom of the barrel. Most people today only know Jobs as the other Santa who introduced shiny new toys once a year. If you want to read about the interesting stuff, just check out Folklore.org. It's filled with fascinating stories written by the people who created the Macintosh. Steve Jobs even shows up a couple of times.

Trailer left me unimpressed

[bfwebster]

I didn't know Jobs well, but I did have a number of direct conversations with him, sat in on meetings at NeXT with him, spent five years developing software for NeXTstep, and had many talks with people who worked closely him (again, mostly at NeXT); our last conversation was him calling me up to yell at me for an op-ed piece of mine in BYTE (Nov 94) called "Whither Nextstep?"

With that tee-up, I'll say that Fassbender's portrayal of Jobs in this trailer pretty much falls flat. Fassbender looks too professional and lacks that burning gaze that Jobs used to such great effect, even while using up the people around him. Frankly, Fassbender comes across more like John Scully trying to act like Steve Jobs than like Jobs himself. Also, it took me a bit to realize that Seth Rogan was supposed to be playing Woz; again, the wrong vibes and aura. Frankly, I think that Jack Black with a beard would have been a better choice for Woz. ..bruce..